The Invention of Rum

""Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Invention of Rum is at once a history of a commodified beverage and of the Atlantic basin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jordan B. Smith evocatively explains how something that had its origins in 'sugary wastes' became an incredibly desirable drink and commodity. He also helps us understand the immense changes that transformed the Atlantic world through the interconnected processes of colonization, trade, and plantation slavery that together formed a brutally oppressive and ecologically disastrous system of extraction. No less this book is a history of how people--and their ideas, materials, and technologies--from the Indigenous Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe converged to invent and create rum.""-- ""Marcy Norton, author of The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492"" ""Fiery yet mellow and full of flavor, The Invention of Rum is a groundbreaking analysis of the transformation of waste from sugar production into a commodity that was highly desirable and profitable and of global significance. Rum, as a product of the intellectual and physical labor of free and enslaved people and experiments from the vast spirit-making cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Europe, earmarked the Caribbean as a region of innovation, knowledge production, and site of modern cultures of taste and sociability. This book is a sobering challenge to the long reign of king sugar in histories of the Caribbean and Atlantic world and early modern labor regimes and consumption and commodity production.""-- ""Sasha Turner, author of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica"" ""Rum was global integration in liquid form, a distillation of the greed, ingenuity, violence, and resilience that organized the early modern Atlantic world. In The Invention of Rum, Jordan B. Smith displays the best of the historian's craft as he ranges across multiple scholarly fields, revises familiar interpretations, recognizes the complexities of the past, and reckons with the continuities that shape our world today.""-- ""Seth Rockman, author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery""